If You Could Time Travel

[AquaTron]

I had this idea a few months ago, and couldn't find anything where someone asked the same question. It started with a set of questions:

If you had the ability to travel in time, would you go to the past or future?

If you go to the past, and could bring one thing with you, what would it be?

• How would it be used?

• Would you use it for personal gain, or a specific community, or to rewrite world history?

If you went to the future would you go simply for enlightenment and ideas?


Would you bring something futuristic back with you?

• What would you do with this new knowledge/object/idea?

Now, let's say it could be anything from a smart phone to a tank or helicopter.


I'm interested to hear what ideas you all come up with!

 

[TBerg]

Going into the future would be depressing. I would get to see all the problems that have not been solved. Going into the past would be better because I would see how things have improved since then. Technically, you can't alter spacetime because even a time machine would be accounted for in a certain spacetime frame. At least that's the way it seems to me.

I would like to bring back artifices of lost cultures so that we could know whether the winners were right about how they wrote the histories.

 

[dad]

I would travel into the future for knowledge, if possible stay there. I wouldn't want to come back to year 2014. Anyways, I'm assuming that in the future time travel is possible, since there is a time machine, theoretically speaking. So people must have traveled back in time in an effort to understand or document life on Earth. All of the information would be known, therefore i wouldn't need to go back in time. I would be able to learn all of it just by going into the future.

If i did i have to go back to the year 2014, i'd come back with knowledge and share it with who ever is interested.

I'd bring a video camera with me to record everything.

 

[Cherry Cola]

Either you travel a bit into the past with an array of patents waiting to be filed which will turn you into a billionaire and give you wast supplies to use in your pursuit of knowledge or you travel to the future and struggle for a bit but get to see things you wouldn't have elsewise.

So I suppose that if going back in time you'd just need to go back 5-10 years to get all the cash you can use, perhaps even less, but if you were going forwards it'd be harder to decide whether to fast forward 50, 1000, 30 000, millions, or billions of years. I don't see why anyone would want to go back more than a few years, things weren't better before, generally speaking.

 

[Beowulf]

I don't see why anyone would want to go back more than a few years, things weren't better before, generally speaking.

I don't think anyone would want go back in time for more then a few years permanently because like you said things are generally better in the future. But if time travel does actually become a thing for all of humanity then i would see people going back to experience past cultures in the same mindset as a vacation with a timeframe lasting about a week or so.

However if i was the only one with time travel i would go to the future mainly to see were humanity truly fucks up. Then i would create a book filled with helpful information and then i would send it to a time in which people would actually use the information.

Of course this scenario assumes i don't go back in time instead and make myself a god trolling all of society by giving them lame conflicting rules to live by. Hell i might just make more then 1 rule book for the fun of it.

 

[AquaTron]

Hmm, very interesting replies.

In my thoughts though, this time machine could be used to travel back and forth. That way you won't be stuck wherever you go. Now let's say I take a smart phone or tablet, with books, diagrams and blueprints of various objects and inventions. I could use this knowledge for power, money, fame, or whatever. I could see two possible outcomes. Either you end up helping one country become a major superpower with an unfair scientific advantage, or you balance the world.

 

[doncarlzone]

I daydream about time travelling rather often. I rarely, if ever, dream about going to the future.

I have no intention of changing the past nor travelling for any financial gain. I would like to go back in time for the same reasons I like travelling to new places, to experience a new reality, usually one which I have read a great deal about.

My daydreaming is based, admittedly, of a very unrealistic method. I would like to travel back in time and either observe or affect the reality with my presence (depending on my mood), however, as soon as I entered that reality, it would be separate reality which would cease to exist the moment I left it (I haven't quite figured out how to leave it, perhaps when I fall I sleep). That way I can experience the past without changing the present.

 

[alden]

I don't know, I can remember some memories, but they're all scattered. My perception of time is distored a little, so that doesn't help with figuring when these memories happened. Sometimes I forgot the day of the week, or month, or the last time I showered... what I last ate(if I ate)... what I said to my friend... etc.

 

[Brontosaurie]

i will see the future anyway so i would travel into the past.

 

[Direwolf]

I would go to the future to get a cloning machine ( assuming there would be one then) bring it to the past to the time of someone like da vinci, clone him and bring him back to the present and see if he can make any beneficial ideas for humanity with todays technology. He was designing flying machines centuries before there was one and that was done with canvas and what not, im genuinally curious to see what he would come up with. That or bring tech from the future back to the present. The idea behind that is if it takes us say 500 years to get tech to that stage, but we get it 500 years earlier imagine the possible advancements.

 

[Rook]

The ideal, for me, would be to achieve immortality.
Thus I will travel into the future until I reach a time peroid when humanity have thrown of the shackles of morality(Assuming the time-machine can be used multiple times).
After immortality is attained, I will apply myself to gathering knowledge, exploring everything that is explorable, and enjoying life.

If humanity never reaches the point where immortality is possible, I will gather as many resources using time travel as I can, and attempt to reach immortality through my own efforts, or use the labour of enslaved scientists.

 

[Liebling]

I would choose not to time travel. My life is needlessly complicated as it is and the good days might be altered and forever changed if I did. I like those memories as they are, despite the bad ones. I would never risk losing ones that I cherish now.

Also, immortality is overrated. Some things are better when the subject is allowed to die. Poetry and artwork are a good example of this. If you live your life right, plenty of people will appreciate you after you have died. With immortality, the opportunity to be apathetic, foolish and downright evil is infinite and since you will never have a legacy to leave behind as an example for others, you just might not give a damn. I just try to make the most of the now and hope it rubs off on people who I'm around.

 

[Rook]

Also, immortality is overrated. Some things are better when the subject is allowed to die. Poetry and artwork are a good example of this. If you live your life right, plenty of people will appreciate you after you have died. With immortality, the opportunity to be apathetic, foolish and downright evil is infinite and since you will never have a legacy to leave behind as an example for others, you just might not give a damn. I just try to make the most of the now and hope it rubs off on people who I'm around.

With immortality, one has the ability to leave a greater legacy, a living legacy. If some individuals were able to change the world in a lifetime, what more can one not achieve within several lifetimes?

I once also thought that life would be rendered meaningless if immortality is attained, but then someone pointed out that there is much that is still unknown, a long life does not necessarily lead to boredom.

Would it not be interesting to stand upon the surface of Mars a thousand years hence?

 

[Liebling]

With immortality, one has the ability to leave a greater legacy, a living legacy. If some individuals were able to change the world in a lifetime, what more can one not achieve within several lifetimes?

I once also thought that life would be rendered meaningless if immortality is attained, but then someone pointed out that there is much that is still unknown, a long life does not necessarily lead to boredom.

Would it not be interesting to stand upon the surface of Mars a thousand years hence?

If you are on Mars a thousand years from now, just to have that experience... what experience are you replacing here with the people who matter most to you and you have the greatest impact on?

A living legacy is too easily marred n human perception. One minor misstep can ruin the whole thing. Any legacy is that way, living or dead. The closure to a legacy that death brings is important to it's fate. With immortality, the billions of other humans on the planet would have one going all at the same time. What would make yours stand out.

My point is that I'd rather live in the now and act as if my legacy was something I should care about in this moment. And now in this one... oh, there is another. With infinite possibilities, I am fairly sure we wouldn't try as hard. I like life being short, it makes the choices you make more poignant.

 

[Reluctantly]

I'd go to the future and get enhancements that make me God-like to the point that I can control my evolution. Then I'd go to the past where there aren't very many smart or God-like people and enjoy experiencing reality completely on my own terms. Of course I'd use my knowledge of how things are going to happen to capitalize on as well. I'd be real when I wanted to be around people and a ghost when I just wanted to observe history. Of course, this assumes the future is incapable of time-traveling and can't ruin my fun; but let's say that's true.

 

[peoplesuck]

go far enough into the future to see how the human race ends up destroying itself.
lots of possibilities

 

[Pizzabeak]

i already know about the past so i'd just go to the future